Three Poems

Placing our emotion on a field, as I said, became a nucleus of spacedefined by a rain of light and indeterminate contours of a landscapelike the photograph of an explosion, and gave the travel of your gaze into it or on meimaginative weight of the passage along a gulf of spaceor a series of aluminum poles

She walks through the rooms of blue chain-linked fence, a spacious tennis courtof rooms on concrete, instead of the single movement of a room where sky and earthwould come together

Outside is the field she is thinking about, a category of gray dotson a television screen, of star data, representing no one’s experiencebut which thrills all who gaze on it, so that it must be experience, andthe land at large becomes the light on the land

A coyote or a flicker’s callis transfixed at the moment before its dissemination across the fielda sediment of, insteadof the tracing of feeling, the ratio of people to the space

I pass through focal planes of blue tennis court as a scene of desireThe material of the sky adjacent to me eludes me,a pure signifier, and shift of sensethe sky or space a gradation of material, the light a traceof mobility like a trace of light on a sensitive screen, extendedinto the plane of the traceand marked by light poles or drawn close by a planet at the edge

Your name becomes a trace of light. Through the movement of the traceits repetition and deferral, my life protects itselffrom blurs, time lapses, flaresof the sexual act, its mobility of an afterimage

Then I can understand the eye’s passage into depthas an inability to stand still for you to see

Duration of Water

So that I make you a microcosm or symbolic center of the publiclike a theatre, with hundreds of painted scenescombining and recombining to exaggerate situations of joy or pain on stage instead offive short songs about you, accompanying dancers who seem to float on their backsin still water, as the empyrean. They would be the water motor. Three stonesprotrude from the water and three instruments combine and repeat a simple scale,but some passions only resolve with fire and weather catastrophes. The orchestranevertheless clears like foliagefor Yang Kue Fe’s sigh, when she hears the emperor wants herThere is a red line on the boards I can follow in the thick smokeor mist. The shoulders of the man change scale, as if I hadbeen manipulating the field inside a small box, to see how lightcan transform me into foliage, as a sexual punishment. The musiccan take on the cold or head of the air like blue chameleons on the limbs of the treeas if you could look through leaves into the empyrean. I turn backmy sleeve with the multiplicity of detail of the battleground. The colorscombine into legible hues at a distance. There is a craft at workto reconcile emotion in a purely speculative ambiencetracking the last aria, like a duration of water,which is a piece of white silk

Texas

I used the table as a reference and just did things from therein register, to play a form of feeling out to the end, which isan air of truth living persons and objects you use take onwhen you set them together in a certain order, conferring privilegeon the individual, who will tend to dissolve if his visual presenceis maintained, into a sensation of meaning, going off by itselfFirst the table is the table. In blue lightnor in electric light does it create pathos. Then the light separatesfrom the human content, a violet-colored net or immaterial haze, echoingthe violet iceplant on the windowsill, where he is the trace of a desire

Such emotional disturbances are interruptions in landscapeand in logic brought on by a longing for direct experienceas if her memory of experience were the trace of herself. Especially nowwhen things have been flying apart in all directionsshe will consider the hotel lobby the inert state of a formIt is the location of her appointment. And gray enamel elevator doorsare the relational state, the place behind them being a ground of wateror the figure of water. Now she turns her camera on them to change her thinking about theminto a thought in Mexico

as the horizon when you are moving can oppose the horizon insidethe elevator via a blue cadillac into a long tracking shot. You lingerover your hand at the table. The light has become a gold wing on the table. She seesit opening, with an environment inside that is plastic and infinitebut is a style that has got the future wrong

Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge is the author of Hello, the Roses (New Directions), I Love Artists, New and Selected Poems (University of California Press), and A Lit Cloud, in collaboration with Kiki Smith (Galerie Lelong).